1. Technical Field
This invention pertains to the field of information processing and communications, in particular to load balancing of incoming information processing work load among instances of application programs hosted on arrays of parallel processor based server computers.
2. Descriptions of the Related Art
Conventional server load balancing systems are implemented by software programs running on microprocessors. However, since a load balancing process is control process, its responsiveness to changes, e.g., in terms of ability to monitor application processing load status and processing resource availability and to actuate the control decisions based on the monitoring, needs to be at least as fast as what can be the rate of potential changes in the underlying load variations and resource availability. A conventional software based load balancers, due to the non-deterministic latency of their control decision cycles, however will, in particular under bursty load conditions, unavoidably, and unpredictably, lag behind the actual, networking and processing hardware level changes in the incoming application processing load levels and processing resource status. This leads to suboptimal control decisions, e.g. via load balancing decisions that, when actuated, are not the optimal decisions for the actually prevailing hardware level circumstances.
Innovations are thus needed to enable load balancers with the ability to handle in realtime, with minimal and deterministic decision cycle latencies, high volumes of load balancing decisions.